When seven collectors and patrons — including Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield — announced that September that they would open a Museum of Modern Art to bridge the gap, the museum was actually a few rooms in the Heckscher Building, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Not having a proper museum, it turned out, didn’t really make a difference: the following March, TIME reported that 1,500 people a day visited the museum — and that the trustees of the institution would have to start charging admission, 50 cents a head, in order to better manage the flow of visitors.

In 1932, the museum moved to a site on 53rd Street that, over the years, would evolve into the building MoMA inhabits today, with six floors of galleries instead of six rooms.